General info

What is it in short?

MultiTail allows you to monitor logfiles and command output in multiple windows in a terminal, colorize, filter and merge.

More detailed description

MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files. Merging of 2 or even more logfiles is possible. It can also use colors while displaying the logfiles (through regular expressions), for faster recognition of what is important and what not. It can also filter lines (again with regular expressions). It has interactive menus for editing given regular expressions and deleting and adding windows. One can also have windows with the output of shell scripts and other software. When viewing the output of external software, MultiTail can mimic the functionality of tools like 'watch' and such.
For a complete list of features, look here.

News!

2015/2/12: released stable version 6.4.1! Marker-line, tabs and allow to map delete as bacspace

Verified to run on...

All major UNIX platforms (Solaris, Linux, *BSD, IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, SCO OpenServer).
Will also run on Cygwin 1.5.19-4 (cygwin enables you to run UNIX programs on microsoft windows).
I've tried to make MultiTail as much UNIX platform-independent as possible. If it doesn't run on one, please e-mail me at: folkert@vanheusden.com.

Screenshot

MultiTail running inside a Gnome terminal.
Click on the image for more screenshots.